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Thursday, 5 December 2013

In bed with a domestic extremist: Mental, the vacuum cleaner, and me

PLEASE NOTE: The following gives away an awful lot about about the vacuum cleaner's work Mental, which he's touring into 2014. If you'd rather experience the show knowing nothing, or at least with its surprises intact, it's probably not a good idea to read it until after you've seen it. Thanks.

We shuffle past the closed bedroom
door, neatly lining shoes along the hallway wall, to a small, neat
living room decorated with insurrectionist art and fabric owls. A
cheerful, kindly woman offers tea and tiny carrot cakes, primly
arranged on a tiered stand, and though the atmosphere is relaxed, an
awkwardness hovers, as though we were gathered for the wake of a
distant relation and weren't quite sure what our demeanour should be.

The bedroom, white with pistachio-green
trim, is sparsely furnished. Disco sings sweetly from an
old-fashioned record player. We snuggle against the wall beneath a
giant duvet and slowly a hand emerges from the low bed before us,
fingers wriggling as they test the air. Then a face, nervous but
smiling. The body is very much alive: it's important to remember
this, that we're beginning at the end, with James sitting with us,
talking to us. We cling to this fact as his story unfolds.

*

“I've never done anything like this
before in my life. Never made a 'show'. It was a real experiment to
try and do it. I'm more comfortable with it now. I've kind of gone,
yeah, I spent nearly two years making this thing, I should show it to
people.”

Ten days before seeing Mental, I meet
up with James-the-vacuum-cleaner-Leadbitter in his basement studio in
the Artsadmin building, a square concrete room that might feel like a
prison – the one small window is high in a corner, and barely lets
in natural light – were it not for the homely clutter and art
crowded around the walls. One painting, hanging above the two desks,
stands out: a rectangular canvas, painted gold, with the words
“Representative art is so 19th century” printed on it in stark
black helvetica. In the corner opposite the window, a duvet is
crammed in the space above a storage cupboard; beside the door sits
the old-fashioned vacuum cleaner from which he takes his pseudonym.
He rolls out a folding table for our tea; I sit in a black office
chair that insists on spinning me away from him. He laughs: “That's
my producer's chair. It's like: get back to the computer, get back to
work.”

Leadbitter started making work in 2003,
shortly after his first stay in a psychiatric hospital. “The very
first piece I did was called Cleaning Up After Capitalism: I had the
vacuum cleaner, and wore a yellow bib with 'cleaning up after
capitalism' on the back, and I'd go into public spaces or corporate
spaces, like chain stores, or the City of London, and do a cleaning
act. I'd clean and engage people in conversation. A lot of my work
was straddling performance intervention with direct political
action.” A lot of it landed him in serious trouble, too. In 2005,
he was taken to court by Starbucks for a number of transgressions
against its brand, which included defacing Starbucks coffee cups so
the logo read “Fuck off” and setting up a website encouraging
others to do the same. It's worth reading the “decision
of independent expert” document commissioned
as part of the case: Leadbitter's irreverence offsets the corporate
humourlessness beautifully.

His protest came from a place of
boredom: “I got bored with mainstream activism, I got bored with
marching against the war in Afghanistan.” And from cultural
discussion around branding: “No Logo came out in 2001 and that was
really influential. I started to read Adbusters, the Canadian
magazine, and fucking around with billboards. Graffiti and street art
really influenced me, that thing of: don't wait for the audience to
come to you, take the work to the audience, go to the community and
present your work to them, go to the contested spaces and make the
work there. That always got me really excited.”

But beneath the global-political was
the local-personal. “Having gone through the psychiatric system,
which felt very oppressive, often it was about creating a space of
liberation through these performative acts. I often would look at
advertising and feel really alienated, so it would be reacting
against that, or challenging that kind of dogma. And I guess I was at
a point in my life when, I was 23, I didn't really give a fuck about
anything. Not I didn't give a fuck about anything, some things
I really cared about, but I wasn't necessarily concerned with what
would be the consequences of what I was doing. Also, the medical
treatment that I'd got really didn't work, so this became my way of
trying to make sense of the world, and make sense of these
experiences I'd had in treatment and as a teenager.”

In some ways, teenage Leadbitter was
typical, at least of people who end up working in theatre. “I went
to a really great youth theatre in Burnley, so I had that bug from an
early age. I used to run tech for the whole youth theatre; my mum
wanted me to be an actor but I preferred doing design.” When it
came to university, he opted for set and lighting design at the
Central School of Speech and Drama: what a mistake. “I hated it: it
was really conservative, and I should have gone to Dartington with my
friend Robert.” He dropped out after a year. But it wasn't just the
course: the depression he'd started experiencing before university
was worsening. He was already self-harming; now he was suicidal. And
this is where Mental begins.

*

There were so many possibilities.

Running in front of a lorry.

Jumping off the roof.

Pills. Knives. Rope-lengths of fabric.

He tells us these stories surrounded by
heavy wads of paper, piles and piles of documents, medical
assessments, police records, obtained via the Freedom of Information
act, each portraying a version of James Leadbitter, the slight man
with tufty hair, twinkling eyes and an electric-blue dress scooping
from his shoulders, who sits in his bed, in his own bedroom, sharing
an outsized duvet with his audience. One by one he slips plastic
sheets on to an overhead projector and reads from them the
evaluations of doctors and nurses, the clandestine comments of police
and their spies. If you're quick, you can read outside the
highlighted sections, get a fuller picture. I notice with a catch of
breath his birthday: 29th May, five days before mine. Fractured
personalities written in the stars.

I don't remember all the details of the
life he narrates – it's a few weeks since I saw the piece, and the
intimacy of the environment precluded taking notes – but I remember
vividly his demeanour. He has the campness of a late-night-telly
light entertainer; the roguishness of a small boy doing something he
knows he's not supposed to, face sparkling with pleasure in
transgressing and being witnessed in his transgression. The line
between performing himself and being himself is subtle, and will
shift according to the perception of individual audience members: I
feel he stands one side of it at the beginning, when he's talking
himself into starting the show, the other in the fleeting moments
when overcome by a memory of cruelty, or kindness. His inability to
comprehend his treatment at the hands of powerful social institutions
is ongoing and genuine. But always there is this levity in his
narration, which comes from a place of generosity, a desire to
support his audience as we listen and absorb.

The disco soundtrack, soft and radiant
with love, gifts more lightness. One song repeats over and over:

Love is, love is the message that I
sing to youLove is the message that I bring to you

The
contrast of that care with the official language of the documents is
sharp. Here, Leadbitter is a number, a sequence of actions, a list of
medication. His humanity is bypassed. Frequently Mental feels like a
work not of individual autobiography but of exposure, indicting a
society that practises institutionalised betrayal. No one who works
at the hospital where he is first sectioned tells Leadbitter that it
specialises in treating personality disorders. The more successful he
becomes as the vacuum cleaner, the more rigorous and resourceful the
police become in inhibiting his activities. It's not until he
recognises a face on Channel 4 that he can explain this feeling of
being targeted: the groups with whom he has been working have been
repeatedly infiltrated. The police documents are packed with personal
information: address, identity numbers, hidden distinguishing
features such as the tattoo on his back that reads “our
civilisation is fucked”. They got that one wrong, says Leadbitter,
mouth curled in a sardonic smile. He turns around, pulls up his
frock; the light catches on the letters carved into his skin: “THIS
CIVILISATION IS FUCKED”.

*

“People talk about mental illness as
this monolith, but it's as broad as any other – schizophrenia to
anxiety is what cancer is to a common cold. It's not comparable, but,
you know.”

At the age of 19 – he's now 33 –
Leadbitter was identified as experiencing multiple mental health
problems: depression, general anxiety disorder, panic anxiety
disorder. More seriously, he was diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder. Only no one told him. “It's quite common if
you have what's called a serious mental illness, so things like
paranoid schizophrenia, borderline multiple personality disorder. For
a long time they wouldn't tell you because the stigma of the
diagnosis could be as bad as the actual diagnosis. I get that, but
for me that's not the issue: the issue is how you inform the
patient.” He finally found out about two years ago, at the end of
an assessment process, when he was handed a sheet of paper with his
diagnosis and sent on his way. There's a painfully funny scene in
Mental when he pulls a copy of Borderline Personality Disorder For Dummies (it genuinely exists) from under the duvet, one of many books
he bought when trying to make sense of this new information.

Essentially, he was being medicated for
a condition he didn't know he had, and that, says Leadbitter, “was
really destructive. Because by the time I was 26, I'd got a job at
the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in Glasgow, I was in a relationship,
but I was still completely undiagnosed, and all of that crumbled in
my hands. I totally destroyed it all because I didn't know what was
going on. I didn't have the language to talk about it, couldn't
reflect on it, you know?” He moved back to London and attempted to
reconstruct his life, “in a way in which I could cope. I developed
all these coping strategies, smoking a lot of cannabis.” But they
didn't work, and in 2009 he had a relapse and was back in hospital.

Acquiring and reading through the
thousands of pages of medical notes written about him over that
14-year period has been “one of the hardest things I've ever done”.
Did he recognise himself in the descriptions he encountered? “It's
really different. Some bits you're like, yes, that's so correct, and
then other bits you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Who
are you talking about? It really depends on the person you're talking
to, because there isn't necessarily a test for it, it's not like you
can do a blood test and be told, you have bipolarity, it's so much to
do with your own representation of your experiences, how you talk
about your experiences.” Which might be different on any given day,
I note. “Exactly. Some days you can't even speak, and some days
you're spilling rather than sharing.”

I ask if there's a family history of
mental illness; there is, but, he emphasises: “I don't buy that
[mental illness] is just genetic or it's just social. I have a very
strong attitude that anybody that wants to apply a simplistic model
to mental health is getting it wrong, because it's infinitely
complicated.” Talking therapy – of which he is a staunch advocate
– offers a brilliant insight into those complications, he argues.
“Although it is utterly, utterly painful, and quite horrific at
times, it's also a wonderful process of discovery, not just in terms
of yourself and your mind but how that relates to the world that we
live in and how society functions. You learn that everything is so
utterly complicated, there are no black-and white-situations.”

*

The lights dim and Richard Hawley's
voice, comforting as a sheepskin coat, croons in the darkness:

Roll river, keep on rolling

Ancient lady cold

I'm forsaken, lost and forgotten

Roll river roll

In James' bedroom, watching a shaky
film of a tiny, adored figure walking in the middle of the street in
a Glasgow full of snow, I absorbed Roll River Roll as a love song;
it's only later, reading the lyrics, that I realise it's the ballad
of a man about to drown. James' description of his post-relapse
suicide attempt is delivered lightly, with a tender solicitude, for
himself and his audience, but with every accruing detail it becomes
harder to hear. He mentions the carrot cake he bought for his final
meal and I remember eating mine before I came in and want to cry. He
shows pictures of his room in the hostel he moved to after leaving
the hospital, a safe house for people at risk of suicide, remembers
the night in the kitchen when he had to resist the siren call of the
knife drawer, and was held by a warden whose non-judgemental
understanding cracked the ice of his benumbed soul, and we all want
to cry, James too. Always there is the knowledge that he is here,
telling us these stories; he survived and continues to survive. But
it's the overwhelming awareness of the pain he has experienced that
makes Mental so difficult to sit within. That, and the fact that he
relives it, in front of an audience, night after night after night.
That in itself feels like a kind of self-harm, and I don't know how
he can do it.

*

“In the three hours leading up to the
performance, it's very like, 'Am I really about to share all this
stuff? Why am I doing this?' And then I start and do the show and
afterwards I feel really icky.”

One of the things I like about
following the vacuum cleaner on twitter – aside from his ongoing
campaign against mental-health stigma, embedded in our culture in the
abuse of words like mental, crazy, bonkers, nuts, which he attacks
with weariness, fury and sparks of dry humour – is that every now
and then he'll have a sharp little dig at conventional theatre. He
looks a little shame-faced when I bring this up. “I'm not a big fan
of what I call theatre-with-a-capital-T. I guess I struggle with a
lack of legitimacy in a lot of these things: when you've been in a
psychiatric hospital, you go to the theatre and, like, this doesn't
compare. When was the last time you saw a mad person play Hamlet? And
how amazing would that be? So yeah, I do bitch about it quite a bit.

“It feels like theatre hasn't quite
caught up with visual-art theory, you know? Visual art has very much
abandoned representative practice, but theatre is still wrapped up in
that. When I do go to a theatre and see the things that I really love
and get me excited or angry or upset, it's people speaking about
their personal experiences, like Kim Noble or Bryony Kimmings. The
first time I saw Franko B – and we've worked together a bit – it
really hit me: it wasn't just this pretending, it was very, very
real. I can relate to that on a very personal level, but I also like
that immediacy.”

When performing Mental in cities other
than London, Leadbitter always aims to find another bedroom to house
it. His one experience of staging it in a theatre venue has confirmed
to him how important that is. “I did it at the Tramway in Glasgow a
few weeks ago, that was to 50 people, and it was really difficult. I
don't think it ruined it, but it did change it quite a bit. I had to
extend the range of my performance, some bits had to be a little bit
bigger. At home I can be quieter, I have that real intimacy. It
changed it for the audience, too: there's this bit in my story about
the police coming into my bedroom to take me into hospital, that's
much more significant when it's in my own bedroom.”

The decision to stage Mental in a
bedroom rather than an open social space like a theatre also demands
that the audience travel somewhere unfamiliar – in my case,
in the dark and on my own, which always generates mild anxiety in me.
“There's a slight challenge in there,” Leadbitter agrees. “That's
something I found doing the show in Latvia, at this amazing festival
called Homo Novus. A lot of people were coming to me afterwards and
saying: 'I was really frightened about coming to see your show, I was
going to be in this bedroom with this crazy person, the police say
he's a domestic extremist, I was frightened! And then it starts and
you just destroyed that thing immediately.' I hadn't really thought
about it like that at all.” But that's wonderful, I say. “It is!
And it's nice to challenge that preconception of mental illness as
well.”

It was the second hospital stay that
encouraged Leadbitter to reconsider his work, and made Mental
possible. The difference, he says, was that the breakdown: “was
really public. I was doing this big commission with Artsadmin, I had
to drop that. That was really difficult, because I felt like I was
letting them down. And I was tweeting about it a bit at the time. It
was this thing of going: this is so fucking intense for me. I was
very close to dying on a few occasions.

“Actually, this is something that's
really amazing: for me and a lot of my crazy friends, we all say this
is our civil rights moment. A lot of us talk about coming out of the
closet. It's this thing of going, fuck it, I'm not hiding this any
more. So although it was very difficult, it had some positiveness to
it. And it really changed the direction of the kind of work I was
making. Also – I found this doing the Mental piece – coming out
and going, OK, this is the shit I have to deal with in life, you get
other people going, yeah, I can relate to your experiences, and these
are my experiences. That solidarity is so, so empowering. When
somebody says, I know what that's like, and you know they know what
that's like, you go: OK, I'm not on my own, this person can genuinely
relate to me.

“The language that people use is
really, really different to when you're in hospital and you say to
the nurse, I don't want to continue any more, I can't take it any
more, and they say, we're going to help you get through this. The
response is so different. It's little things like, I said to somebody
I really want to self-injure, and they were like: have you tried
putting elastic bands around your wrists? When you really want to do
it, pull them really hard and flick them against your wrist. I tried
it and it was great. Or I'm having a panic attack on the ward and an
old guy comes over and calms me down in 10 minutes, no drugs, sat
with me, held my hand. It's a really beautiful and amazing thing to
have that solidarity and mutual care. More of that please.”

Increasingly, his work seeks to create
places in which solidarity, empathy and empowerment can flourish.
Many audience-members have commented that they could do with sharing
the cup of tea after Mental, rather than before, to decompress after
inhabiting such an intense space; Leadbitter understands that need,
but asks his audience to leave directly after the show, because he
too needs space to look after himself and decompress. (This isn't a
hard-and-fast rule, and compassion is exercised: the night I saw it,
one member of the audience was so affected they left the bedroom,
went straight to the bathroom and burst into tears; they were then
allowed to stay in the empty bedroom until ready to face the night.)
As quoted above, performing Mental makes Leadbitter feel “icky”;
what pulls him through is the audience response, not in the room so
much as in conversation, on email and on twitter in the hours and
days afterwards. People open up to him about their own experiences
with depression, doctors, anti-depressants; they ask his advice; they
tell him: “I can relate.” In Latvia, he says, “a 19-year-old
woman came up to me after the show and said, 'I've never said this to
anybody, not even my parents: I have a psychiatrist. I've never told
anyone and I've seen your show and I'm not embarrassed any more.' For
all the difficult it is for me to do the piece, for that one person,
I'm happy.”

Prior to Mental, he made a piece called
Ship of Fools, in which he turned his flat into a hospital for a
month and sectioned himself. “The Ship Of Fools will function as an
inter-section between mental sanctuary and creative liberty,” he
explained on his website. “As part of this time the vacuum cleaner
seeks creative residencies at the Ship Of Fools: both artist and
non-artists alike in an attempt to find creativity in madness.” His
next project takes that idea much further. “It's called Madlove –
A Designer Asylum. I'm a big believer in the notion of an asylum, a
safe place to go to experience madness, but it's going to be an
asylum designed by mad people for mad people to experience madness in
a more positive and less painful way. We're going to bring mad people
together and people that work in the mental health industry, or
people that are carers or that support people, and say: right,
because psychiatric hospitals are so oppressive and so difficult to
be in, let's redesign it completely. Let's think about what we need
to go through this experience. It's still going to be painful, but
let's change it. My producer has this really wonderful statement:
it's putting the treat back into treatment.”

I can't wait to visit.

*

Seeing Mental had and continues to have
a profound effect on me. It's affected how I watch theatre: a few
days after I was in Leeds and happened to catch the James Brining
production of Sweeney Todd at West Yorkshire Playhouse; its first
scene is set in an asylum, and it looked exactly like the asylum in
Joe Hill-Gibbins' Young Vic production of The Changeling, right down
to the individual gestures of the actors. I left at the interval,
unable to watch any more, feeling no connection with what I was
seeing. At the end of November I caught up with Hannah Silva's The Disappearance of Sadie Jones, a taut three-hander about a woman whose
depression has led to anorexia; there was much about it, not least in
the breakdown of language, that felt insightful, and yet part of me
was troubled by the aestheticisation of this experience, particularly
in a scene when Sadie kneels on a cabinet and slowly wraps a red
chiffon scarf around her waist and wrist, delineating self-harm. In
that moment, honesty was replaced by theatre.

Much like Chris Goode's God/Head,
Mental has made me reconsider what it means to be honest. Now and
then people commend me on the honesty of my writing and I feel
quietly fraudulent, because I hide as much as I reveal. I come from a
very old-fashioned culture that believes fundamentally in putting up
a front; much as my family rail against its hypocrisy, it's coded
within us and that's a hard habit to break. But it's also typical of
me to interiorise everything: keeping a blog has been extraordinary
in that respect, in reminding me that self-expression isn't just
possible but OK.

Increasingly I'm interested in what it
means to invite someone to listen to the voice that rattles around
your own head. A lot of the work I've really cherished this year –
Mental, The Worst of Scottee, Laura Jane Dean's Head Hand Head, Peter
McMaster's Wuthering Heights – in some way or another does exactly
that. Head Hand Head (which Chris Goode helped in shaping) really
touched me: for maybe 40 minutes, Laura enacts the different
obsessive compulsive routines that she has adopted over time to cope
with the paradoxical trauma of being so terrified of dying that
you're afraid to be alive. The voice that speaks to us is the same
voice she hears inside her head. It felt like a privilege to be given
access to something so private.

Mental felt like a privilege, too. I
left it feeling intense gratitude towards James, for sharing his
internal voices with me. I heard enough of myself in it that I've
been galvanised into doing things I hadn't previously thought
possible, into engaging in conversations that I hadn't previously
been able to contemplate. The narrative of struggle, or not being
able to cope, is still expressed so rarely that people are startled
by it, or react negatively to it: we need to work together to support
its honest expression, and through that change the social conditions
that make struggle and the inability to cope so much a part of our
lives.

*

“Do you feel in control?”

He shakes his head. A barely audible
whisper: “No.”

“What could be done for you to feel
in control?

There's a small pause. “Well, I think
that the art world needs to get a bit real about supporting disabled
artists. Artsadmin are phenomenally great at it but I feel that a lot
of the time me and my producer are really having to fight for the
support I need to do the show; we're having to say: 'This is why it's
going to be a bit more expensive, because somebody needs to help him
and look after him.' So that could be better.

“Not being attacked by the state for
being disabled would be a help: I'm going through the Atos process at
the moment – Atos Healthcare are doing the whole welfare reform
process – so I'm having to defend my benefits, it's really
anxiety-provoking and the stigma is still really horrific. I've been
assaulted coming out of the hospital, people have attacked me because
I'm coming out of the psychiatric hospital. Casual use of the word
mental, or the casual use of the word crazy, it hurts, it hurts when
I hear it, so that's still difficult. It's difficult to have to go:
listen, I don't want to be aggressive or assertive about this, but
can you not use that word around me because it hurts.

“There are some really amazing people
out there who get it. Without Gill Lloyd [co-director of Artsadmin],
without Lois [Keidan, co-director of Live Art Development Agency], I
would have stopped making work three years ago. Gill has fought,
she's said: 'James, you need to keep going; I'll help you write an
Arts Council application because you can't even read at the moment;
if you've nowhere to go, sleep in your studio, don't worry about the
rent, it's fine.' I was going to get kicked out of the homeless
hostel I was in and the fact that she would stand by me and write to
the council and say, 'You can't do this to somebody', that is
phenomenal.

“The way I describe it to some people
who I feel don't quite get it is: 'Imagine you're doing a show in a
building and it's not wheelchair accessible, you wouldn't say to the
person in the wheelchair, you need to build your own ramp to get into
the building.' But often that's what happens to me: often, I have to
explain that I need to bring two people with me, one to look after me
during the show, one to look after me outside; I need a quiet
dressing room because when it's noisy I'm going to have a panic
attack.

“That's part of the battle and I'm
prepared to fight for that, because it's not just for me: it's for
every person who has a mental illness.”

1 comment:

So much going on in my head just now, Maddy, I find it impossible to write it down. But the word that comes to the surface is Thank You. Once again.This sounds like an amazing piece of work and I am grateful to you for telling me about it and for reminding me such work exists. I notice I have lost my curiosity about theatre, mostly, and don't really want to see anything. What you write helps me think about why and make sense of myself. And how lovely to really want to see something again. xxxx

a bit about me

Some of the things I cram into my too-short days: writing about art and music for the Guardian; collaborating as critic-in-residence with Chris Goode and Company; rethinking what it means to be a theatre critic as part of Dialogue, a collaboration with Jake Orr; thinking about audience development as part of Fuel's New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood strand; dancing with the Actionettes; drawing, baking cakes, making clothes (a lot less of all of those these days); struggling to bring up two not-so-small-any-more children; daydreaming a different world; writing it all down here...